A blog about anxieties, fears, insecurities, friendship, family, loss, caregiving and everything else that is part of the experience of being a female Torontonian.

Introduction

September 2009

As some of you may know, I used to be part of a circle of friends that referred to itself as Misfortunate. Contrary to popular belief, this was not a self-referential description. Considering who was in the group, I would not be surprised if anyone believed the opposite... It was just that we communicated via a free forum that we put up at redmond.misfortunate.org. We all went to the same high school, you see: Father John Redmond.

On this site, we did fun things like insult each other while we anonymously and publicly argued about religion, politics and current affairs. We dissected minutiae. We posted and contributed solutions to fun math problems. We hosted one MisFortunate Short Story Festival (which was supposed to be the first of many) where we submitted and voted on a theme, wrote and anonymously submitted 2000-word stories based on said theme, and then voted not anonymously for a winner. (I was the winner!) We planned upcoming documentary nights, then commented on them. We planned our annual visits to Montreal. This was the first year in many that it didn't happen.

You won't be able to find this site now. It has migrated many times since inception (circa 2003), had different admins, gone through several facelifts and upheavals, been broken and fixed, etc... Anyway, this is hardly relevant. The only point to be made is that the name of this blog is stolen. (Thanks, Dave). It is the name of my favourite category heading from redmond.misfortunate.org. Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays.